Premio Combat Prize

€”And The Last Book shall fall on a desert of memories, melancholic and longing visions of a glorious past! And the sand will cover the pages, and hide the last written characters, in a last and tragic whisper towards the greenish ocean…”
BIOGRAFIA
Xavier Loureda is the pseudonym of a famous Portuguese composer and conductor, concrete painter, dedicated to abstraction, both in a geometric and non-geometric world. But beyond that, Xavier Loureda exists as a true heteronym, a real person inside the men’s spirit, and like the example of the multiples persons in the work of the poet Fernando Pessoa, it is the painter who materializes the sound of the musician into colour and form.

Each one of his paintings is the skin of music, the visual body of each note and silence, the movement of harmony, like a polyphonic architecture, the visible of music’s invisibility: it is a real and original iconography of listening. The high sounds and those low and deep, the tones and notes, becomes seen to the eye, free from the pentagram and alive in a world of chromatic intensity and dynamics. Loureda, taking a different path from the one of Klee’s – and here relies his unique and absolute particularity – doesn’t translate literally a written score, does not interpret a pentagram into a pictorial mean: the artist creates the images, the pure forms, before writing his own music. He sees it before being articulated into the world of notes and rhythms and tones. And what is, in reality, this singular way of seeing, but rather imagine the music to come, an interior vision which becomes matter in the outside, subjective and communicable like the sound it self? The law of Loureda is geometry. Colour is his freedom. Music is everything: soul, origin, and path.

The artist works with several techniques and styles, including pastel and acrylic, on paper and canvas, and explores often the inclusion of matter in his paintings, like sand, screws, books, pencils, and others. He has exhibited his work on several occasions, in Milan and Paris, and worked with the famous Italian art marchand, Jean Blanchaert.